10of12Precision Drilling Rig Up Foreman Steve Brouwer works in a air-conditioned control room of a new drilling rig the Calgary rig contractor assembled at its plant in Houston.Photo: Steve Gonzales, Staff Photographer / Houston Chronicle

The very nature of work in the oil and natural gas industry is changing.

While roughnecks and roustabouts and other blue collar workers still sweat in the field in flame-retardant overalls and boots, a new cohort of tech workers report to the office in jeans, hoodies and designer shoes.

With crude oil prices stuck in the $50 per barrel range, drilling activity is down and energy companies are making a major to push to digitize and automate operations as a means to reduce costs.

That push is driving the growth of six-figure tech jobs that prize skills such as coding, design, data analysis and computer system architecture over physical prowess.

A young and diverse class of tech workers are filling a new jobs such as scrum master, data scientist, cloud architect and user experience designer.

Like other companies in the industry, Canadian pipeline operator Enbridge recently opened a Silicon Valley-style tech lab at its Houston office.

Patrick Lamasney

Senior Scrum Master

Lamasney left a mid-level management job with the travel site Expedia and moved from Seattle to become the senior scrum master at Enbridge’s Houston tech lab in August. Borrowing a term for rugby players packed closely together, Lamasney leads morning meetings known as “scrums” where lab workers huddle to talk about what they are working and offer each other advice on how to solve problems.

Q: Why did you take this job and move to Houston?

A: The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something is a very rare opportunity in software development. Usually you get added to a project that already exists. There’s very few green field software development projects going on, regardless of where you’re at. This is a tremendous opportunity.

Q: What kind of projects have been able to work on?

A: Information is disparate, so we are going to be bringing all that together using machine learning to help us prioritize the high value areas to address. We’re already thinking about how to use virtual reality to inspect pipelines using drones.

Q: How does the lab compare to other places you’ve worked?

A: There are a lot of similarities. The open nature of the floor plan, very low cube walls — you don’t feel like you’re in a cube. You’re in a more open space. It allows for open communication very quickly. It’s faster than an instant message. I love the open monitors that we have going on.

Q: How would you describe the work environment here?

A: We have an open invitation to just about anyone in the building. If you want to come up and just hang out and work, you’re more than welcome. It’s a different environment. We’ve got couches over there, a ping pong table if you want to take a break, there’s snacks over here.

Srapanthi Nuthulapati

Data Engineer

Nuthulapati earned a bachelors degree in information technology in India and a masters degree in information systems from Texas A&M International University in Laredo. She worked 12 years for natural gas pipeline operator Spectra Energy, which was purchased by Enbridge in February 2017. She is now a contractor at Enbridge’s tech lab in Houston.

Q: Do you find the work you are doing challenging or rewarding?

A: The energy industry itself is evolving into tech, which is a plus. Energy companies want to use technology in their decision making, which is critical from a safety standpoint. That’s the kind of project that I’m working on which makes me happy. I’m going to save some lives.

Zhijun ‘June’ Zhang

Senior Data Scientist

Zhang graduated from the University of Houston with a PhD in electrical engineering. She held data and engineering jobs in with oilfield service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Welltec, before joining Enbridge’s Houston tech lab.

Q: How do you like working in the tech lab?

A: We run fast paced. This team is young, we are like a startup and the team is fast growing. Everyday I am exposed to cutting-edge technologies in the oil and gas industry. Everything I do here has a very high degree of visibility and based on my previous experience, upper management has very little idea about what the average person is working on. But here, there is a direct line to upper management and they are intimately involved in the decision making.

Q: What appealed to you about working at the tech lab?

A: I am very passionate about data analysis, data science or anything about data. In my mind, I want to change the world for the better by using the skills I learned in data science. Data science and machine learning are not new concepts. They have been applied in many areas. But, applying data science to machine learning or pipeline industry is very new. And we all know the pipeline industry provides critical services to people, impacting people’s daily lives.

Yared Akalou

User Experience Designer

Akalou graduated with a bachelors of communications from Texas Southern University in Houston and a masters degree in product design from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He worked for a health care tech company and the global consulting firm Accenture before joining the Enbridge’s tech lab in May.

Q: Most people don’t think about Houston as a tech hub. How do you think about Houston?

A: I’m a Houston native and it’s easy to take for granted what we have in our backyard. When you take a look at what Houston represents, it is literally a world hub, a tech hub for energy. It’s just not consumer-facing tech, it’s more in the background. It’s the things that you use to warm up your home every day or when you go to a restaurant and get a hot plate of food. All those experiences are affected by energy and the way energy is moved and transformed. I was really taken by that. With such complex moving pieces and the initiative to digitally transform how data is analyzed and how decision making is made, I was attracted to that.

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So far, it’s been successful. Among other accomplishments, lab employees have helped to develop ways to get sensor data from pipelines faster and improve crude oil and natural gas flows at the company’s terminals.

The stories of lab employees Patrick Lamasney, Srapanthi Nuthulapati, Zhijun Zhang and Yared Akaloureflect the change in the industry.

Sergio Chapa covers the oil & gas industry for the Houston Chronicle and writes for Texas Inc., a weekly Monday insert dedicated to covering the most powerful business leaders in Texas. Sergio was born and raised in the Lone Star State and studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously worked at the San Antonio Business Journal, KGBT-TV in the Rio Grande Valley and Al Día in Dallas.